ARCHAEOLOGY - Museum of Natural and Cultural History

1 Edited byDon E. DumondRichard L. BlandTranslations byRichard L. BlandARCHAEOLOGYINNORTHEAST ASIAON THE PATHWAY TOBERING STRAITiiiContentsEditors I. The Paleolithic of Western Beringia:A Summary of B. Complexes of thePleistocene-Holocene Boundary in WesternChukotka (Tytyl vaam River Valley)..Margarita A. Kiriyak (Dikova) Khaya IV Site: A New PaleolithicComplex of the Okhotsk-Kolyma B. Slobodin43 Part II. The Dissemination of Studies of Obsidian ExchangeNetworks in Prehistoric Northeast V. Sources and Prehistoric ObsidianUse on the Kamchatka Michael D. Glascock,Vladimir K. Popov, Yaroslav V. Kuzmin,Robert J. Speakman, Andrei V. Ptashinsky, and Andrei V. Grebennikov73 Part III. Pottery Making and the CultureHistory of Neolithic Sakhalin.

2 Irina S. Zhushchikhovskaya and Olga A. Industries in the North ofthe Russian Far East ..Irina from the Bluff ofthe Ekven s Gelbert Miemon159 Part IV. Bering Strait and the Marine Reservoir Effect in theNorthern Bering Sea ..B. F. Khassanov and A. B. Materials for the Interpretation of theChertov Ovrag Site on Wrangel V. Gerasimov, E. Yu. Giria, V. V. Pitul ko and A. N. Backward Glance from E. PrefaceThe present volume represents a logical sequel to our earlier effort in a similar direction, whichwas published in 2002 as ARCHAEOLOGY in the Bering Strait Region: Research on Two Continents (University of Oregon Anthropological Papers 59). Again, this one is the brainchild of the one of us(Bland) who was particularly interested in the translations of non-English material, and who thenobtained the support of the National Park Service Beringian Heritage Program for the project.

3 Asbefore, the other of us (Dumond) shouldered a substantial part of the editorial chores followingtranslation. In this case, Chapters 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10 were received in Russian and translated byRichard L. Bland; Chapters 3, 4, 5, 8, and 9 were received in is not unusual, the romanization of Russian words has presented a problem in this case, we have departed somewhat from our practice with the previous collection, in which werelied on a very slight modification of the Library of Congress system of transliteration, by introduc-ing some slightly more drastic modifications although in mild opposition to the opinions of someof our contributors. Specifically, we here adopt the Geographic Names use of ya and yu for the twoappropriate Russian letters, retain the apostrophe for the Russian soft sign (or myagkii znak) as well asthe umnodified e (as opposed to ye) for the Russian letter so written.

4 For spelling personal names, wehave tried insofar as we were able to follow the preference of the individuals involved. In the matterof references, the job of editing from a substantial distance, and often without full Russian biblio-graphic resources at our disposal, has resulted in a few inevitable variations between sources as listedin the various chapters. This inconsistency is even more true of labels on contributed illustrations,especially on maps. In spite of this, we hope the result will be at least minimally , we offer our thanks to the contributors, who have borne with us without evident signsof rebellion during a period in which the translating and editing has dragged on. We are grateful toYvon Csonka, who initiated our receipt of the paper by Agn s Gelbert Miermon (Chapter 8) andprovided the introduction for it, and to Nan Coppock-Bland who valiantly read the text when it wasin somewhat less than presentable form.

5 We especially acknowledge the Beringian Heritage Programof the National Park Service in Alaska, which has blessed the project in the best of all ways bymaking it financially of Geographic TermsIt also seems not unreasonable to provide here a list of some of the geographic terms thatappear in the papers and illustrations, in the off-chance that some readers may not be familiar with allthe e (alternatively Primorye), literally against the sea, referring to the region immediately westof the Sea of Japan, with the word also designating the Russian Maritime e (or Priamorye), literally against the Amur, the region to the west of the lower e (or Priokhotye), against the Okhotsk, the region to the west and northwest of theOkhotsk e, against Baikal, the region to the west of Lake Baikal, including the Angara River e, beyond Baikal, the region east of the same , now officially Sakha or the Sakha Republic, the major territory to the west of Kamchatkaand Chukotka, including much of the drainage of the Lena , the province including, and immediately to the west of, the Chukchi Peninsula and theAsian coast of the Bering Strait in the North Pacific region.

6 1 IntroductionDon E. Dumond and Richard L. BlandBERINGIA, AMERICA, AND NORTHEAST ASIAIn the later 1500s, almost a century and a half before Vitus Bering would verify the existence ofthe strait that bears his name, a Spanish priest suggested on the basis of physique and culture that theultimate origin of American Natives was in Asia. He also speculated that the ancestral Americanshad entered the New World at a point where it abutted the Old World, possibly even over a landconnection, and that this point must have lain somewhere in the north Pacific. Since that time asupportive current of belief has been steadily strengthened by research of various kinds ( , Dixon1993:2-3, with references).

7 In the 1930s, a botanist applied the term Beringia to this still-hypothetical land bridge of thepast, and within another three decades the former existence of the bridge was demonstrated Asia and America across Bering Strait through exposure of the shallow continental shelfwhen major declines of sea levels accompanied periods of heavy terrestrial glaciation, the mostspectacular drop was during the Last Glacial Maximum of the Wisconsin period, when sea level fell125 m below that of the present day, and the land bridge was more than 100 km in north-southwidth. Since its first use, however, the term Beringia has come to designate not only an exposedBering Strait, or the Bering Land Bridge proper with adjacent expanses of the Bering- and Chukchi-Sea floors but also to include substantial modern terrestrial regions both to east and west of theStrait (see Hopkins 1996 for a summary of early thought).

8 Nevertheless, the territory of this larger Beringia has been defined differently by different inves-tigators. Its conceptual center is always the Bering Strait region, without which there could be noBeringia. To the east, commonly enough, Beringia is taken to include essentially all of mainlandAlaska and usually that uppermost corner of Canada lying west of the Mackenzie River. In northeastAsia it is thought to extend at least as far west as the Kolyma River basin, but some researchers pushit farther west to the Lena River, or to the Verkhoyansk Mountains between the Lena and theYana. To the southwest it may be extended to the Okhotsk Sea and Kamchatka Peninsula, and evenin some opinions is pushed as far as Sakhalin and a portion of the nearby Asian coast (see West[1996] for a particularly extensive geographical definition).

9 In present usage, in any event, EasternBeringia refers to Alaska and a corner of Canada, Western Beringia to portions of the northeast-ern Asian mainland, with Central Beringia incorporating the present Bering Strait region the outside boundaries given it, the reality of Beringia lies in its former connectionbetween Asia and America, which is presumed among other things to have formed the pathway for2 ARCHAEOLOGY in Northeast Asia: On the Pathway to Bering Straitthe initial peopling of the New World from the Old. As glaciers melted and seas rose 14,000 to10,000 years ago the reconstituted strait and its neighboring seas became the maritime home ofhistorically known peoples, related across the water.

10 The History of Northeast Asia, then, must beboth parent and sibling to the History of America, and as such it will be addressed works devoted to understanding the prehistory of this northeasternmost Asia, severalmajor and consistently addressed themes, related but different, can be extracted. The first of these,of course, is simply the outline of the apparent pathway of Cultural developments through is, many reports focus almost exclusively on the chronicle of events as they can be recon-structed archaeologically, sometimes looking only at material culture, sometimes with reference alsoto the ethnographies of historically known peoples, an approach often called ethnogenesis.